The importance of being Tony Kornheiser

As far as I am concerned making Tony Kornheiser a commentator on Monday Night Football is the single most shocking development in the history of television.

AP

One of these men is an authentic network talking head. The other is Tony Kornheiser.

Tony is on MNF?

Seriously?

You may know Kornheiser as one of the two hosts of “Pardon the Interruption,” with Michael Wilbon, but he’s really a newspaper columnist through and through. He’s balding, red-faced, and looks absolutely nothing like an NFL quarterback.

I like that.

Kornheiser made his debut Monday night and you had to tune in, just to see if ESPN was serious. Kornheiser has his own show with fellow Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon but putting Tony, who I once sat next to in a track stadium in Seoul, with him wearing the largest, most tattered brown straw hat in Korea, kind of boggles the mind.

Apparently, the John Madden effect is deeper than we thought. The idea is that, OK, this guy isn’t exactly blow-dry anchor man handsome, but he has some interesting things to say. He’s kind of funny, and perceptive, and people like him.

So it was apparently just one more step to a newspaper columnist.

What no one knows about the NFL is that the best color commentary is in the press box. No, not the one on top, where the boys in the blazers sit, but the one down below where the mustard-stained newspaper writers complain about the food and offer up snarky, humorous, and often dead on, analysis of the game. Why not give one of them a try?

On one hand you could say this is a bit of a risk. On the other hand . . . well, Dennis Miller.

Miller, the comedian, was supposed to bring a wacky sensibility to MNF. But actually, not so much.

Kornheiser made his debut last night and for an awful few minutes it looked like a bit of a train wreck. The old smoothie, Mike Tirico, laid down the play-bay-play, and jabbering Joe Theismann went off on one of his trademark “hitting the seams in the two-deep zone” eye-glazers, you had to wonder if there was any air in the booth for Ol’ Tony.

But there was a role after all. Think of it this way. Theismann is a balloon and Kornheiser is a pin. When Theismann went on and on about Raider quarterback Aaron Brooks and the offense getting on the same page, making adjustments, and mobility in the pocket, Kornheiser went to the numbers. Brooks was 0-4.

“Those aren’t good numbers are they?” he asked.

Oddly enough, that is exactly the question Raiders fans have been asking during the first two exhibition games.

So that was fine. Kornheiser managed to work in a “Snakes on a Plane” reference, which is the cultural touchstone phrase of the moment.

Unfortunately, he came up with it in a poorly-conceived segment called “Tony, Tony, Tony,” where viewers write in with offbeat questions. As is so often the case, moderation is never an option for the deep thinkers at the networks. If a little is good then great heaping shovel-fulls is much better.

Do they want one-liners from Kornheiser? Great. Let’s just pepper him with straight lines all night. Uh, no. Leave him alone. Let the quips come up naturally during the flow of the game. He will be fine.

Apparently the reviews were “mixed” about Kornheiser’s debut. Which is another way of saying almost everyone liked what he did. The New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times all thought he was a much needed breath of fresh air.